vomitrocious

[Lynne Murphy]

My crowd used this when we were teenagers--early 80s, western NYS. I
associated it with Valley Girl speak.  (Not that we were anywhere near the
Valley.)

Lynne

--On 15 July 2008 23:43 -0400 Benjamin Zimmer
<bgzimmer at BABEL.LING.UPENN.EDU> wrote:

> On Tue, Jul 15, 2008 at 11:15 PM, James Harbeck <jharbeck at sympatico.ca>
> wrote:
>>
>> I remember this word from Delia Ephron's book _How to Eat Like a
>> Child_, published in 1979 with illustrations by Edward Koren (in
>> fact, IIRC, the word appeared in an illustration). I can't find my
>> copy of the book just at the moment, however.
>
> Ah, of course. (It came out in 1978, actually.) Via Amazon's Search
> Inside The Book, here's the text from p. 30:
>
> ----
> How to Express an Opinion
> Yucky
> Gross
> Dis-gusting
> Ugh
> Sick
> Sickening
> Scuzzy
> Smell-y
> Oh, barf
> Creepy
> Icky
> Obnoxious
> Boy, is this dumb
> Creeps
> Crummy
> Vomitrocious
> ----
>
> I think that book was influential for a lot of kids growing up in the
> late '70s and early '80s.
>
>
> --Ben Zimmer



Dr M Lynne Murphy
Senior Lecturer in Linguistics and English Language
Arts B135
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QN

phone: +44-(0)1273-678844
http://separatedbyacommonlanguage.blogspot.com

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